Entertainment

Facebook Redesign: Are Developers Ready?

As expected, Facebook has conveyed its plans for the upcoming profile redesign to the developer community in order that they better prepare for the way in which these changes will affect the applications built on Facebook's platform.

What's also expected, is the fact that nearly half of these changes revolve around the newsfeed. The main areas that developers need to be aware of are the location of the newsfeed, the way in which newsfeed content is published, tabs, profile boxes, and information sections for applications. Here's a quick rundown:

New Feed Stories and Templates: the size of feed updates will be varied across three different sizes, and application publishers will be able to take advantage of these in order to provide more useful feed content for users.

**Given the amount of tweaking Facebook has already done in terms of the ways in which developers can communicate to users through newsfeeds, this particular feature will likely see more tweaks later on down the line to improve the process.

Publisher: On the new Feed and Wall tabs, adding content to your own Feed or to a friend’s Feed or Wall will be a main focus of the experience. The Publisher allows users to add content such as text or photos, or rich content from any application such as music, videos, images, links, and more.

Application Tabs: Users will start with 5 tabs on their profiles by default (Feed, Wall, Info, Photos, "Boxes") and can add tabs from their favorite applications to better represent themselves. Users can add as many application tabs as they want –- up to 6 tabs can appear (space-permitting) and additional tabs will be included in a More dropdown.

Profile Boxes: Existing wide and narrow profile boxes will now appear on a new Boxes tab that every user can enable/disable on their profile. In addition, Facebook is supporting a new profile box type that can appear on the left-hand side of the user’s profile across the Feed, Wall, and Info tabs.

What's it all mean for developers? More ways in which to get their apps in front of users, and leverage those users for spreading their apps across Facebook to other users. Facebook has had a lot of trial and error experience when it comes to integrated applications, so with the profile redesign, which was a true ncessity after it opened up its platform and gave users more ways in which to customize their profiles, Facebook really has to communicate with the dveloper community to ensure a smooth transition into the redesign.

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